KEEPING TRACK OF EVENTS

Interview with Tim Steerby Romuald Demidenko

We’ve sat across each other and started typing. That is how we started thinking about this interview in the beginning to be both online chat with IRL conversation on top. Tim is working on the selection of screenings for Material Art Fair as part Opening Times. And you can visit him in London privately as he’s started up a space in (by appointment only). We’re talking about technological bonds and daily routine as well as some of the behind the scene’s of his curatorial and writer’s work

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Federico, choreography, at the exhibition Re: Re: at New Work, 2015

At the beginning I wanted you to tell me a little bit about the design of your website. There are some sleek or glossy book pads smoothly rotating. Is it an ironic comment to the overused term 'circulation'?

I arrived at the design of the website by trying to keep the styling pretty much raw and unchanged from a default style. I used a default blank template that just specified Times New Roman, 12pt etc. But I realise that the effort in making something undesigned still makes it just as designed.​The stands are definitely playful, but probably not as blunt as referencing 'circulation' directly. They’re more to do with looking at the supports and structures that frame displays and content. They use a language of high-gloss, over-exposed product videos (itself a support), but they are the stands for another device, like an A4 paper, an iPad, a screen. So, they reference the background of how we engage with content and are literally placed as a background to the webpage and its content.

Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Federico, choreography, at the exhibition Re: Re: at New Work, 2015

Tell me a little bit about your background because as you've told me you were shifting from an artistic work into becoming a writer and curator. How did it go?

I've taken a confusing path and made a couple of shifts. Quite young I wanted to be a writer or a poet and that led me to study English Literature for a BA. However, I also had strong interest in art and by the time I was coming to the end of my studies I was inserting art and art analysis where I could - my dissertation thesis was about internet art. After that, I started working at galleries in London for a couple of years before doing an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. I never had a studio practice and I was excited to think and work in a new way. But as with my BA, before I finished my studies I was already shifting focus, this time to organising exhibitions. When I graduated I was already Associate Director at Seventeen and was investing most of my energies to exhibition making and research.

Re: Re:, installation view at New Work, 2015

'A couple of years ago I would load the Facebook page, then refresh a minute later even when I knew that nothing could've changed, but I was just locked in unconsciously, into a sort of a pattern'

You recently opened a space New Work and you co-founded the pretty active platform called Opening Times which has a number collection of projects by artists like Constant Dullaart or Ruth Proctor.

I’ll start with Opening Times which is an ongoing project that went online in June 2014. This developed out of looking at how digital art was being addressed - seeing on the one hand an engaged, technologically proficient and aware audience, and on the other hand a broader audience who often viewed digital artworks simply as novelty. At one end of the spectrum you would have art being produced and viewed by a community with an extremely sophisticated understanding of the technical procedures and historical precedents, at the other end of the spectrum was a broader art audience who still had a hard time accepting the idea that an artwork could even exist in its primary form online. Obviously by 2014 digital art wasn’t exactly ghettoised anymore, but there is still a long way to go. So Opening Times was an organisation I co-founded with four others to meet these two extremes somewhere in the middle. We wanted to produce and support digital content that was sensitive to the history of digital art production while enabling broader conversations with contemporary art; so for example, we maintain a parity with artists who are already technically proficient as well artists who have never produced digital work. This extends to the discourse surrounding digital art - we also commission writers to assemble and produce editorial content that contextualises the field. Again, bridging the gap of how digital art is addressed.

New Work is a project space that I’ve been doing in my house since last December. It also came about by answering a need - in this case, a space fell through for a show I had been developing for a number of months and I needed to organise it somewhere else. It worked pretty well for the project, in terms of the context and the concept it was derived from. I’ve been working through some ideas for a while and I definitely want to make more things happen there in the upcoming months. I don’t want to define its programme or function really (even giving it a definition of a project space might be too far) - I like that it’s pretty fluid right now.

Opening Times, logotype

What are you currently working on?​Literally right now I’m working with the rest of Opening Times on a screening programme for Material Art Fair’s Public Programme that will take place over the 4 days of the fair. At the moment we’ve been assembling the artists, putting them together and getting permissions.

More broadly though, at Rupert I’m working on an ongoing research project looking at the practice of addiction, with the intention of producing a text and eventually assembling an exhibition. To give you a brief outline; I’ve been looking to re-deploy the term addiction (emulating Deleuze's discussion of anorexia as a micro-politics) as a way to re-think how the subject functions in relation to the other and to society. Unlike the way desire is normally produced and circulated, the addicted subject doesn’t need the other object; their body becomes the site of enjoyment and desire. The subject therefore bypasses and redirects the previous subject/object relations and social codes and reinvests them into a new closed system and circuit for pleasure - the body. How this ultimately develops depends on the where the works and research ending up taking me.

I guess that in your work a big part is being made at the desk with a computer. Do you think you use a lot of technology in general like with other devices?

Yes, I mean there's an active attempt by companies to keep you attached to these devices for as long as possible. All the time you’re locked in with so many competing bits of information and notifications. It’s hugely distracting... and I don't know, maybe it's just my personality type because I feel like I get easily fixated and obsessed by things but I also think these device interactions are set up to tap into deep-routed biological reward centres. Sometimes I catch myself going through the unconscious routine of checking information. A couple of years ago I would load the Facebook page, then refresh a minute later even when I knew that nothing could've changed, but I was just locked in unconsciously, into a sort of a pattern. After that, although I didn’t quit Facebook, I found it so disruptive that I now only use it for messaging friends and keeping track of events.

Also, recently I’ve been trying to keep a practice of turning off my phone or leaving it in a flight mode while I sleep and most of the morning. Then after I’ve done some reading or exercise first, I’ll turn it on - just so my mind isn't calibrated into that pattern and routine for the day. ​

Re: Re:, installation view at New Work, 2015

You've mentioned the British Library that makes you the most comfortable to work at. Are you using devices when you go there or you rather read?

When I’m researching yes, I use an iPad and keyboard. The environment is different though, even if the access and devices are the same, because the other people working surrounding you basically function as a kind of superego. You don’t feel you can succumb to any privatised and obsessional time-wasting on your device because there’s a sort of public shame in doing it - it’s a great motivator...

Re: Re:, installation view at New Work, 2015

There is quite a vast number of Londoners residing in Vilnius. Would you consider yourself staying here for longer?

There’s always something attractive coming into a new scene or situation and I think I understand the appeal of working here. Though this is probably a naive viewpoint from someone who doesn’t know Vilnius that well but it seems to me that unlike London, New York or Berlin etc you’re not working with or against something, you’ve got the opportunity to carve out your own interests without them being subsumed under all the other competing voices and related projects. I don’t know about staying longer than a month, but I do intend to come back and spend some more time.

One of the website's design at timsteer.net

Tim Steer is an independent curator and writer based in London. He is co-founder of Opening Times and runs New Work.

The conversation with Tim Steer is part of the project Vilnius at Work​, newartcenter.info's residency at Rupert, Vilnius.